Terrible/Perfect

Ode to joy

I read this New York Magazine article a while ago, and I highly recommend it if you have kids, or are thinking about having kids, or are thinking about not having kids. If you've decided you're definitely not going to have kids, and you are one of those people who think that your decision makes you smarter and more responsible and better looking than people who have kids, you can skip it because it will only make you feel smug, and that doesn't look good on anyone.

Here's the thing: I'm surprised that people are surprised by the research on happiness and child rearing. Parenting is so many things, such a mixed bag of highs and lows, but I would never say that having children made me happy.

Knitting makes me happy. Day hikes make me happy. Driving a car alone at night with music playing loud makes me happy. Getting drunk in a bar with a jukebox and playing pool with good friends makes me happy. Watching action films of the 1980s with my dad makes me happy. Ben and Jerry's in general makes me happy.

Taking care of my kids doesn't make me happy. It's an absolute struggle on a daily basis to try and do the right thing and not treat the older one like shit because she's high strung and demanding and doesn't sleep well and when she's in the bathtub cannot stop herself from squirting the baby in the face with water from the extra peri bottle from my birth kit. Sometimes locating the nonviolent communicator inside yourself, the emotionally literate calm talker, the information giver and the soother and so help me even the one that can ignore the stuff that really ought to be ignored, is like trying to squeeze that last drop of water from a wrung-out cloth. It hurts your hands, and you keep twisting and nothing's coming but you need that drop, you need it right now, you need it 10 minutes ago before Big Kid shut the baby's finger in the door and you had to turn the handle and open it to get her finger out again. How is that in any way related to happiness?

There's the joy, of course. I know it makes some people without children incredibly angry when parents say this (and unfortunately it's not a universal experience) but I had no idea what it meant to love someone before I had my first child. I remember getting Big Kid home from the hospital and for the first moment having some quiet time by myself to hold her, and in the absence of hospital stress and birth fatigue, suddenly feeling this bottomless pit open up and yawn inside me. My breath caught in my throat; nothing anyone had said could have prepared me for that moment, for how terrifying my love for her would be. It was overwhelming. I held her tiny fluttering body in my hands and sobbed. And with the second one, a friend of mine said it best: "When I had my second daughter I was disheartened to realize that I can't just kill myself if something happens to one of them."

It gets a little easier to cope with that love as they get older, and surlier. They start to become people of the world a little more, and spend less time in Tir na nog. They start saying really insane and wonderful things that you mean to write down but almost always forget, and at some point they can play chess and make a sandwich and things are kind of settled and pleasurable before the teen years hit, or so I'm told.

There's a lot of joy in there. There is transformation and depth of understanding. There's figuring out how to get out of your own way and practicing kindness and learning to earn forgiveness and experiencing the wonderful magic of children themselves. I feel grateful to know my girls, who are both funny and ridiculous and full of life.

But, as one psychologist says in the article, “They’re a huge source of joy, but they turn every other source of joy to shit.” 

It's true. You trade in your big "I" Individual card for a while and get used to someone wrecking your nice things and keeping you awake at night and trying to sit on your lap while you're pooping and yelling at you when you try to listen to NPR on Saturday morning. In exchange you get to royally screw up raising someone who you would give both of your kidneys to. 

The other day I was struggling to hold it together, was exhausted by the endless repetitions of "Mama? Mama? Mama? Mama?" and the conflicting needs that took too long to fulfill and the impatience of both children and myself and finally I was involved with some kind of chore and making headway (was it making the beds? washing dishes? using the bathroom?), when I heard relative quiet in the living room. I looked out at the girls and saw this:

Big Kid had put an audiobook on her CD player, put the headphones on Baby and given her a cup of milk out of the fridge. She had done it to make her happy, because she loves her.

That's the joy.

You get to witness their lives. You get to love them.

That's all. That's everything.

Tintin

In with the new

Big Kid has a new room!

Actually she has the same room, just different stuff inside of it. But it is new, improved stuff!

Grammy took BK out this weekend (Baby and I tagged along) and bought her a new bed, dresser, nightstand, bedding and some accessories. Prior to this excursion I had a bunch of set ideas about what I wanted BK's room to look like, and it was this whole vintage floral idea, with a Jenny Lind bed and Target Shabby Chic bedding, milk glass bud vases, that kind of thing. She is the uber-girl and I thought that would hit the spot with her.

However, it became very clear very quickly that it was the Big Kid and Grammy Show and what they came up with was different from what I had envisioned. It was an excellent exercise in remembering that my children are not me. Some day their room(s?) will be something terrible to behold, and yet a sacred sanctuary that I cannot interfere with lest the resulting battle should create a rift in time and space through which Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, can enter.    

So they had their way all over town, and it's quite cute:

 

That's the new stuff. I am positively stumped as to why this would be, but although there was no change in the type of furniture in her room, no extra storage, no structure removed that was not replaced with something functionally equivalent yet larger, she seems to have a great deal more space. I didn't even organize anything. It was just swapping out a toddler bed for a twin and ditching one chest of drawers for another. Oh, what mysteries shall be explained on the other side!

I'm more or less happy with the preceding part of her room (I think I'm going to change out the drawer pulls, and the nightstand is coming later; the owl lamp will go on it next to her bed), but there's still some work to be done elsewhere:

This child's hutch was up at my great-grandparents' ranch when my dad was a child. I love it, but it's proved a little awkward and I'm still not sure how to use it best. The print needs to be hung, but I'm going to buy a new frame for it. I'm kicking myself for not buying more of those little Liberty frames. I didn't know what to do with them when I bought them (they were in my room, which is why they still have pictures of the girls), but now I am stoked on the idea of using them for BK's sweet little doodles.

This is the Bad Wall. The bookshelves are mismatched and not quite adequate, the French alphabet up there needs framing, and there is a big blue plastic tub of stuffed animals just to the left of this that is ugly as sin. The stuffed guys are going in a rolling under-the-bed bin, and then on the Bad Wall I'm going to do this. Almost exactly. I will omit the middle shelving unit, and I think I'm going to add doors to the bottom of the two units we'll get, but it will be a white floor-to-ceiling deal that should carry both girls through for a long time storage-wise. Frankly I'm not even sure we'll need two, since everything she has is out here as you see it (there's a closet, too, with blankets, dress up and a bit of toy storage).

Bonus time!

I had to move the old furniture out of the room so the delivery guys could bring in the new stuff, and the manky toddler bed ended up on its end in our bedroom until I could move it out to the garage. When her dad got home I made BK recreate Sarah Connor's psych ward pull-up scene from T2:

 

 

Because I'm a nerd. That's why.

Twight club

Last night my husband and I did something we said we would never do.

We watched Twilight. On purpose.

I realize that this is a dead horse at this point, and as criticism goes about as stinging as a handful of shots from an X-wing across the bow of a continent-sized Imperial Star Destroyer (Pew! Pew pew! Pewpewpew!) I also really, really don't want to be mean and cynical and petty, here or anywhere else, so please place a great big grain of salt in your cheek ahead of the bitter draught I'm about to spoon into you.

But Twilight.

It was SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. So. Bad.

So bad.

I'm not going to discount the fact that the Twilight series has an unbelievably huge fan following (can we look forward to a Twilight theme park in Forks someday?) and that clearly many millions of people have connected with the story. I would also never begrudge anyone who is so inclined the enjoyment(?) of a vampire romance novel. I know that the correct response when I don't share enthusiasm for something otherwise popular, like Snuggies, is to quietly not give a shit.

But I need your help here. I need you to make these two facts fit in the same universe:

1)Stephenie Meyer is making $40 million dollars a year off of her books and related hoo haw. 40 MILLION A YEAR. She has more money than God. She's on all kinds of important cultural movers and shakers lists. She is a demigod grown to the size of a small world and she has come to Earth to lay fiery waste to the fertile grasses and suck the riverbeds dry and choke the mouths of the cattle with dust. 

2)Stephenie Meyer's books suck balls.

This is not writer envy speaking, it's pure infantile bewilderment. I don't know where my mother is and I need someone to hold me.

Once the film ended and I stopped staring gape-mouthed at the screen, I got to thinking. I was thinking about writing, and storytelling, and what, precisely, went wrong here, and what glistening fecund kernel of truth that a grovelling beetle larva of a storyteller like me might pull from the salted earth of Twilight.

What struck me most powerfully, besides the vampire baseball (Re: Vampire baseball: WHAT THE HOLY LIVING HELL?) was that her story is centered on an absolute nonentity. There is no such thing as Bella Swan. There is more character in a deflated beach ball, or a used Kleenex. I mean that. 

Character traits that we know of Bella Swan:

1)She is clumsy.

2)

3)She is a sad panda.

I do understand that a movie is not the same as a book, but I refuse to spend the hours it would take to read the novel so I can compare the two. I have read excerpts from the novels, though, and the characters seem to hold true across media, which is to say their hollow shells do not crack when pressed from paper to celluloid.

I won't even go into the dynamics of the Edward/Bella imbalance of power, or the fatalistic obsessiveness, or his stalking and physically threatening behaviors, but for two hours I watched a girl with no definable character traits exercise no agency whatsoever (this is a cultural touchstone for a generation of teenage girls: discuss) and I will say that it helped me understand one fundamental truth about storytelling more deeply.

I will now share it with you in seventh grade level metaphor.

In the jewelry of a story, characters are the gems. Those gems are given their depth and brilliance by having many facets, only a few of which you can see at a given time. It is the job of the storyteller to skilfully hack the diamond out of the rock and present it in its proper setting; you don't just hand over the stone out of the riverbed and call it an engagement ring. Or worse, you don't give someone an empty set of prongs. And then jam it in their eye.

That is an incredibly important writing lesson, and for that I have Stephenie Meyer to thank.

Watching the film wasn't a total wash. The moment when Bella enters the biology lab and Edward acts as though she has stashed three day-old roadkill in her knickers and he's going to vomit from the stench is the gift that keeps on giving. Vampires in ill-fitting striped baseball caps is a glorious treasure. The paper-thin abstinence metaphor that casts teenage boys as barely-contained powder kegs of raw sexual need (I won't be able to stop myself!) and girls as their unwitting, doe-eyed tempters (her "blood" smells like heroin dewdrops on the glittering vanilla hide of a magical candy unicorn! He wants to eat it) has kept me smiling all day.

And now that I've thoroughly offended and alienated any Twilight fans that may happen by here (truly, I'm glad you enjoy the books and/or films; things are about 75% witz und vielfalt, 20% sleep deprivation, 3% piss and vinegar and 2% thoughtful analysis around here), I'd like to add that I don't know that I could do any better. It's easy, as a novice, to think you could. For a long time I used to disparage what Joanne Rowling did with Harry Potter, because her writing, the actual, technical, word-by-word writing, wasn't stellar. But, like Stephenie Meyer, Rowling started out spring green; over the course of her seven novels you saw a tremendous progression. I have serious issues with her finale, but she created a world that you inhabited, and characters that you genuinely loved (what would we all have done if she'd killed off Ron?). The story she told, through the characters she brought to life, bounded and soared. It was a true feat of imaginative power.

As I'm learning more about writing, as I'm doing more of it, I'm coming to appreciate just how hard it is to tell a story.

It's a minor miracle when you can tell one that other people want to hear.

House beautiful

I am almost sorry to report it, but turning 30 has given me a startling clarity of purpose. In practically every regard, I feel more settled: matters that appeared muddy have shifted into crisp focus, I have goals that are attainable and specific, and the confusion and anchorlessness that marked my sense of self in my teens and twenties has abated immensely. It's been coming on for a while now so the birthday itself wasn't magical or anything, but there it is: beginning my 30s I feel like I know who I am far better than I ever have before. Here's your cliche, you're welcome.

Do you know what I really know about myself? I know what kind of couch I want.

Congenitally, I'm not much of a style person*, and unfortunately I don't have the money to pay someone else to apply their immaculate style sense to my house or my person. I haven't had a coherent look to my space since I was 17, and at that point it was a kind of "Trent Reznor and Stevie Nicks go shopping at Pier One" thing, a lot of black and Nag Champa and dried flowers, which at 30 I am no longer feeling.

But a pleasant side effect of getting a better grip on my sense of self has been a growing ability to identify what I don't want in my life. That applies to serious matters, but right now I can tell you that I don't want any goddamn contemporary country-style home furnishings. I don't want anything that has the word "Tuscan" associated with it. I don't want floral throw pillows. I don't want to eat meatballs at the same store that I buy my next couch. I don't want ornamentation, I don't want chair rails, I don't want Federal, I don't want Windsor, and I definitely don't want a big puffy corpse-grey leather recliner (I have had one of those, and it was very comfortable but visually offensive).

The hang up is that for years now my home furnishing budget has been: $0

Which is limiting.

Getting where I want to be will require ruthless purging, Grand Master-level organizational skills and a dogged persistence on Craigslist and in the thrift shops, but fortunately not only do I know precisely what I don't want, I know exactly what I do want.

Last year we moved into a duplex that was built in the mid-1950s that improbably retains original details: seashell pink bathroom fixtures, the original kitchen cabinets, doorknobs, light switches, light fixtures (lead paint...). Before we found this place I had NO idea that I was a mid-century modern person, but I am, 100%. I didn't know this because nothing in the shops is like this. I've never actively looked for vintage home furnishings. But I have looked at my kitchen, and I saw that it was good.

This is going to be a long process and a lot of work, but to get myself started I went around the house and took pictures of the items in the house that I unreservedly love. Like turning 30, I was amazed to see a clear picture form out of what seemed like the errata of a more than a decade:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like the warmth of medium-toned wood; the pale pastels of 1950s appliances; the bright shock of vintage Pyrex, yellow and turquoise and red; the levity and sharpness of Japanese design; the calming cleanliness of solid color, pale and dark.

I brought home a bunch of paint chips and matched my bathroom fixtures, kitchen cabinets and some other accent colors around the house, and I'm putting together a mood board. The purpose of the mood board will be to keep me from buying things that don't belong. Really I don't need a mood board, though, because I have this: 

Weezer, Adrian Tomine, lady superheroes, mid-century pastels. That is my design concept right there.

Related odds and ends:

-I love my (very!) old friend (she's not old, she's 30, like me...you know what I mean) Alisha's design concept for her new apartment. It brings to mind Bob Ross landscapes, which makes me think of how much silly fun she and I had as girls.

-This front room is lovely, modern but warm and easy to live in. I'm looking for a Danish modern credenza just like that. I saw two (TWO! At the same time!) at Goodwill last summer and I'm still kicking myself for not buying one. And what is up with Portland? I have major metro envy right now.

-Only vaguely related, but I found The Walk to 40 Weeks via oh dee doh and now I'm kind of nutballs about Ryan's blog Pacing the Panic Room. He's candid and funny, and it's been good for me to read about parenting and marriage from a male perspective.  

That's all, folks. Have a good weekend. Big Kid's grandma is taking us furniture hunting for a new Big Kid bed. It should be interesting. She wants Cars bedding and I...don't.

*I did not inherit my sense of style from my mother, who always looks pulled-together and keeps an immaculate, highly styled home. I take after my father, who keeps his life clean and tidy (I'm still working on that) but finds striped shirts intimidating (dark plaid button-ups and plain polos only, please) and made a fairly sizable leap when he changed out the inexpensive white-with-navy-blue-stripe dishes he and my stepmother bought when they first married for a new set of higher quality white-with-navy-blue-stripe dishes given to him by my grandmother. I am much like him, in that whatever I buy for our home is going to need to be willing and able to stick around until I go into assisted living.

Covert ops

I found this little green man up to some kind of reconnaissance from the light switch in Big Kid's room the other day. I sometimes think that the inside of her head is like an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse, only slightly less gay.

The livin' is easy

 

 

 

 

 

We've been summering it up around here, as I'm sure have all of you what live in the northern hemisphere.

Now I'd like to take a moment to say something important.

It's taken me a solid year to find my voice as a blog writer, and will take me still further time to find a writing routine that works with my life as a mom (I have some fiction in the works, too). I realize that there are a number of ways to approach this medium in terms of tone and content that are are worthwhile and meritous, and there are many motherbloggers who intentionally focus almost exclusively on the lovelier aspects of home life.

I myself have chosen a blogging style that I like to call "Shit Just Got Real".

I'm not saying shit ain't real when it's pretty, or, like, informative or whatever, but I'm talking about the kind of shit that is often actual shit, the kind that as it gets real also gets pretty f-ing funny (or rather tragicomic; also I don't know why I feel sort of okay with using "shit" here occasionally but not the f word, but I'm either applying MPAA logic OR adhering to the profanity pattern of my childhood, when I heard my mom say "shit" that one time and it was really surprising, but my dad dropped the f-bomb on an almost daily basis while driving and liberally while putting up the Christmas tree).

So to provide some context for my photos, we're having a lovely summer. By lovely I mean that both of my kids have had back-to-back colds and the flu for the last two weeks and I have washed vomit out of my bed linens twice. I was able to complete two rows of the knitting you see up there before Baby got herself high centered on a board with a nail in it (head end out!) climbing into a flower bed. Big Kid was so taken with her tutu bathing suit that she spent the majority of her sprinkler time looking at her reflection in the sliding glass door, jumping up and down, shaking her butt and laughing. One afternoon several days into our homegrown episode of the Andromeda Strain I lost my will to live and went out to buy ice cream. We came home, I put Cars on for Big Kid and then I gorged myself on Rocky Road and Tings (not together, I don't know if that would be good).

I did manage to finish The Magicians by Lev Grossman and I enjoyed it immensely. I also enjoy my retro and elephantically heavy push mower, a kind gift from a dear friend and neighbor, so much so that I push it around the yard a little bit every day whether I need to or not. Rule #1: Cardio. 

Really it's been a pretty decently good summer. Once the plague has passed maybe we'll go camping or go to the beach or something rad like that. But first my children have to stop producing mucous out of every orifice.

How's your summer going?

Oh smeg.

A number of years back my husband and I were in Harrod's and saw a tidy, stylish, retro icebox in their appliance department. I adored the look of it, but what made the sighting epically memorable was the brand name:

Smeg. It was a Smeg fridge.

For years now I've kicked myself for not having a camera at that moment (and I do urge you to go into Harrod's next time you're in London; it is a dark, opulent, warren-like emporium, like the inside secret womb of an avatar of greed and material lust), not because "smeg" is uncomfortably close to the name for a disgusting human biological effluent, but because it is a made-up, oft-used quasi curse in the completely absurd British science fiction show Red Dwarf.

Fun fact: Craig Charles, who played Lister in the series, is from Liverpool, which is where my husband is from. I sometimes try to explain the accent, because it sounds nothing like either Cockney or posh English, which seems to be all most Americans have heard before. The older generation sounds more like The Beatles, the younger more like Dave Lister.

A few days ago I was at a friend's house leafing through a home decor magazine when I saw an interior profile of someone's teeeeeeensy little wee ickle 1,400 square foot tiny fairy vacation house (nearly direct quote: "The tiny bathroom is hilarious- just a toilet, a sink and a shower stall!") with a guest quarters with full kitchen, which the owner had outfitted with a SMEG FRIDGE (because it's ickle and, uh, let them eat cake or something; what a bunch of smegheads). 

The article pointed out that the Smeghead fridge could be purchased at Sears! Very exciting.

Curious, I peaked at the Sears website, and found the Smeg fridges.

I also found this:

 

HA! At Sears!

Honestly, I don't know what's going on with this. I still love the fridge, and I find the onesie both incredibly amusing and discomforting. Is this a Red Dwarf reference? A Smeg fridge reference? Something....else? Whatever it is, I like it.

Cannon v. Canon

We had a lovely holiday weekend, spending the 3rd with lovely friends in their lovely home eating delicious food and playing board games, which is my FAVORITE THING TO DO EVER EVER. The 4th itself sucked royally, because Big Kid is afraid of her own shadow and the town parade had a cannon. It was quite a small cannon, and I was both gratified and secretly disappointed that it didn't actually fire projectiles, but it did make an enormous KABOOM! that made my poor little frightened rabbit go all Yuen Woo-ping and jump 15 feet straight up and 20 feet straight back. The fun of a 4th of July parade is somewhat dampened by the tears of terror streaming down your child's face. True story.

I'm having a great time with my new camera. Even without any new lenses it's handling situations that made my old camera cry, which includes basically every photograph I take inside my dark and cozy hobbit hole of a house.

 

 

Snorg!

Yup.

....

I really want a cannon.

Lead, red

You know, I kind of forget I have a blog sometimes, and then I remember and think "Oh, crap, people are looking at that thing!", except they're not, of course. Mostly.

There have been some shenanigans around here lately, the most exciting one being the repainting of our bathroom, which involved our neighbor sanding off old paint and laying down primer, yaaaaaawn, adding the kicker that one of the old layers is lead-based and after he was done and everything was all shop vac-ed up I got to quite literally wipe down the entire room with a wet cloth repeatedly to remove as much of the remaining fine layer of dust as possible, only to find that the dust had gotten inside the cabinets that I had taped up against this very possibility and there was a slender coat of powder on our toothbrushes and little pale blue drifts in the corners of all the shelves. We have small children. I threw out the toothbrushes and spent hours going over every surface again and again and I'm still kind of panicking.

Otherwise, situation normal. Big Kid has a freaky monstrous old red wig that she wore as part of her Ariel costume a few Halloweens back, and Baby found it the other day. Naturally she was very happy to waddle around looking like Hedwig on a bender, pleased as spiked punch, until I got out the camera.

 

 

 

Normally she's bald as a cleric but sometimes she puts things on her head and says "Haaaaiw. Haaaaiw." In this case she was marginally correct. It is, in a manner of speaking, hair.

I will be somewhat surprised if hers looks like this when it comes in, but you never know.